Thursday, October 06, 2005

Three Moves Ahead

From our steadfast colleagues at Cursor comes the welcome news that Indiana State Senator Patricia Miller has withdrawn legislation that would have made "unauthorized reproduction" a Class B misdemeanor. Under Ms. Miller's proposed law, unmarried women and gay women would have been forbidden from using "artificial reproduction procedures" such as in vitro fertilization, sperm donation, and the like; even married women would have had to undergo an intensive (and intrusive) screening process to obtain a "gestational certificate" from the state. According to the AP, Ms. Miller claimed the issue had become "more complex than she thought"; in other words, she was deluged with angry mail and phone calls from blog readers after the story broke on Tuesday.

Before you pop the cork on the Veuve Clicquot, however, please visit Tsuredzuregusa, where you will find a series of outstanding posts in which our astute colleague Shaula Evans explains why Republicans are in the habit of drafting crappy, patently unconstitutional legislation; why it is important to fight such bills at the legislative level, rather than waiting for the courts to throw them out; and what we can expect to see once the right wing achieves total hegemony over the judicial branch (which should be any minute now):

[W]hether or not Harriet Miers is approved, and regardless of *which* Bush nominee is ultimately approved, Republicans will shortly control the Supreme Court, and will continue to do so for decades. In order to overturn previous Supreme Court decisions that they desparately hate, they need court challenges to consider. Deliberately introducting unconstituional bills like the Turkery Baster Bill at the State Legislature level, in Republican-controlled states where they can guaratee passage of the bill, is how to set up the public to bring cases before the Supreme Court that will provide a pretext to overturn those decisions. And at that point, "unconstitutional" is a function of who controls the Supreme Court, and how they (and their masters) have decided to interpret the constitution.

The following bills are all potentially up for challenge once we lose the Supreme Court: